As you might know, the hard part for businesses today is to get attention. Customers’ attention is gold. Attention can be monetized in many ways. Advertisers’ first goal is always to grab attention. But it’s not only about advertising. This is a must task for many different areas, including your on-site marketing.
See the thing is, the users are fed up with banners, annoying popups, and even flyouts.
While this… Well, this is a solution that is beautiful, elegant and catches attention in a pleasant and unobtrusive way. It’s called a Side Menu (Free version | Pro version).
This Side Menu plugin does mainly 2 things brilliantly:
- It catches users’ attention
- It directs users’ attention to wherever you want
Now, for the second part, people use the Side Menu in many different, creative ways.
They are based on these 2 ideas, however:
- Direct users to any url, be it within the website or an external url
- Provide any kind of handy widget for the user
By the way, this same developer has the Modal Windows plugin, which work seamlessly with Side Menu, so users can click a side menu button and you can show them anything in a modal window, right here and right now, without reloading the page, which is very handy for users, since they dislike loading new pages and waiting and try to avoid that if they can.
Here is an example of a contact widget:
Also, this plugin has the built-in social sharing buttons, as well as a print button and a back to top button.
What I personally love about this plugin though, as a designer probably, is that you can choose any color you want, insert any Font-awesome icon or your own custom icon… And create beautiful tasty side menus.
Let’s check out a few more examples of how people use it.
Here is a great example of using it to provide useful functionality to users, which they can quickly access. In this case, a request a quote, which links to a separate page. You could take it a notch further and implement a quote calculator in a modal window, for example.
You can also implement the in-page navigation by inserting the anchor links instead of regular urls, and this website is doing a great job utilizing this feature for its landing page:
This example is particularly beautiful, due to the use of transparent backgrounds for the Side Menu buttons:
These guys utilize the built-in sharing buttons nicely, in a unified style:
By the way, they are also using the Modal Windows plugin: it has a built-in fixed button feature. And these guys are using it for the Contact Us popup.
Finally, this website utilizes the custom icon feature, for the third button, for which font-awesome icons didn’t fulfill their needs:
So, the Side Menu really is a great little plugin that can provide both a better experience for your users and a fatter wallet for you.
One little drawback of the plugin is that it is a bit glitchy on the mobiles, but the developers promised to deal with the issue soon. For now, you can turn it off easily for mobile devices and only provide this richer side menu experience for bigger screens.
As we have seen, you can use it both for marketing purposes and for giving your users extra useful content and functionality. Let’s try to summarize what you can use it for:
- Direct users to any url
- Show users any content in a modal window
- Show users any widget in a modal window
- Lead magnet
- Contact form
- Request a quote calculator
- Etc, etc!
- Provide social sharing buttons
- Setup in-page navigation, include the built-in ‘Back-to-top’ button
- Implement a Print function with the built-in ‘Print’ button
Guys, join thousands of Side Menu users (according to the developers, the plugin is currently used by 12965 users) and make your website that little bit more cool and unique.
Good day, everyone! Go get this plugin while it’s available!